Books - Shadow Heir: A Dark Swan Novel by Richelle Mead

400 pages

So this is the first book I had read in a while where I really felt like I needed to hash out my thoughts on it. I will warn you that there will be spoilers in this so feel free to skip it until you read it... I would like to say that you could read on and then decide if you want to read it but that defeats the idea and I am not going to go so far as to say that you shouldn't read the book. It was still a decent story... It is just the last book in the story and it didn't feel like a smooth landing more like a rocky bumpy had to use the emergency slide landing.








Now to my thoughts.





I read the first book in this series in paper a bit before the second book came out then picked up the rest either the day they came out or pre-ordered them on the kindle. This one I bought on release day and then had to push through reading the book I was already half way through so that I could get into this one. I started it on Monday night and finished it off Thursday night. Not the fastest but pretty fast for a busy week.

I was just really disappointed in some of the character and plot decisions that were made. There were many points where I understand that Eugenie has a problem with doing as she says and the banter back and forth with Dorian where he suddenly is to be trusted felt like a drastic shift in this book. Reflecting on the other books I guess you could say that he had a greater good in mind but not really and it wasn't where those stories were leading you. He was/is manipulative and while he loves her in this book and may have loved her in the others there wasn't a slow transition where there is a realization or such it is just, bang, he loves her and will do anything she asks. It did not feel true to the rest of the series.

Then there is the issue of Pagiel... I honestly can't remember him in the other books. Maybe at the end of the 3rd one but he just wasn't memorable. It really feels like this one was thrown in to give the last book a bit of a toss up and plot twist. He also dies so spectacularly poorly. "Aw your dead dood!" If she was able to kill that easily why the hell didn't she just do that to Eugenie and be done with it. Little spell and the problem with the babies is done... no fuss no muss.

Now to the part of the story that just pissed me off. People may complain about her leaving her kids in the NICU to go off for months. I can buy that. Parents go off to war with their new born babies at home... They do it because that is their job and they do what they have to. In this she is tied to the land so it is even more personal that she needed to fix the problem. I did half expect that there was going to be a double crossing in there and she would not come back to find the babies and they would have been kidnapped but that is another thing. My problem comes with the information that it is Dorian that is the father. That would have been okay as a zinger at the end but here it is tossed out and leads to wrecking the end of the story. I could understand even debating about telling Dorian and then choosing not to tell him if there was another book in the works as honestly Kiyo is going to tell him... At some point something is going to happen where he either wants to cause a rift for strategic gain or just to get back at them for something and he will toss out "oh yeah what do you think of Eugenie leaving your kids in the human world with all that metal and technology to irritate them?... Oh you didn't know they were yours?... I would have thought Eugenie would have shared that with you sometime in the past 10 years..." And then you have a rift that will happen. If it doesn't go that long then it will be that Eugenie will give in herself because she feels bad about keeping secrets when she has harped and harped on him the whole time about not trusting her.

And that leads me to the fact that while Eugenie was a flawed hero the entire rest of the series she was still a hero and always tried to do the right thing. In this ending she gets to live a lie and be everything she hated about Dorian and suddenly he is the hero being good and thinking about others first. Really why would you do that at the ending. If this was the transition book setting up the character flaws for the next story it would be cool but no we are just ending it here and here is a very dirty sad place.